Stupid Girl

In a miserable building at the end of an unlit hallway in a cold room sat two men and one woman at a rectangular table made of rusted metal. One man, considerably larger than the other, with a square jaw and square shoulders and square hands, placed an aluminum flashlight on the table before him. He reached into the breast pocket of his coat and pulled out a leather case containing a circular filter and fitted it onto the lamp head. He handed the woman the flashlight and sat down on the rusted metal chair at the head of the rusted metal table and cleared his throat.

“Now, Lena, once you’ve signaled, you’ll need to appear near the entrance of the library at the corner of Kalinin and Romanov four days post-signal at precisely 7:37am with a Safeway bag in your hand. Across the street, you’ll see an agent who will be holding a Harrods bag and eating a Mars bar. This will signal that the plan is in motion. Are you with me so far?”

The woman did not answer.

“Two days after, you’ll go for your regular walk at 7:15am. Instead of going left through the park as usual, you’ll cut down a side street and take the alleyways to the train station, making sure all the while that surveillance has been lost. Still with me?”

No reply.

“From there, you’ll board a train for Vyborg, a town near the border of Finland. You’ll be met by embassy vehicles who will toss you in the trunk and deliver you to Oslo, where you will board a plane for London. Once in London, you will be taken to your new living quarters and provided a new identity. You may not write any of this down. Understood?”

The woman sat, clutching the aluminum flashlight in her hands, and she stared silently at the floor.

“Lena! Are you listening to me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Please leave.”

“Yes, sir.”

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Yelena Volkov, born in the Spring of 1937 to a homely widow of immense proportions, was known to her peers and teachers as objectively the stupidest girl in Moscow. She could not master the lessons she was given and barely achieved standardized literacy benchmarks. When asked one day in elementary school by a particularly orthodox child of a particularly orthodox parent to describe her allegiance to the CPSU, Lena replied sweetly and with the blankness in her eyes of a post-mortem portrait that she had not heard of that university. Upon completion of secondary school, it was widely speculated that Lena’s mother used her influence as the widow of the Colonel of the KGB to delicately suggest to Lena’s instructors that they might inflate Lena’s performance records so as to avoid arrest.

Lena was, however, as beautiful as she was idiotic, and at age 22 Lena was married to a recently-returned soldier who had been appointed to a KGB Security Troop stationed in Moscow. This, of course, was communicated to Lena as “continued military work” so as not to confuse her. Together, they lived in a ground-level flat in New Cherry Town with white walls and concrete floors and stiff furniture, and they were very much in love.

It was in this flat on a Thursday evening, one week after the meeting in the cold room with the rusted table and the aluminum flashlight, that Lena was preparing dinner for her husband. He returned home at 6:23pm with two officers and requested Lena make up additional plates for them. Dinner was served at 7:02pm, and by 7:27pm her husband was dead, slumped over the table with his face in his plate, his hands dangling lifelessly at his sides. The officers, with a dramatic show of surprise and sympathy, rang immediately for a doctor, waited for the body to be removed, and swiftly left the apartment.

Lena stood at the doorway after they had gone, digging her nails into her thighs and breathing quick, shallow gasps until her face tingled with numbness. Then, she walked very slowly, almost confusedly, over to the dining table and sat in plain view of the window. She did not weep as widows do, or burst into hysterics as witnesses of sudden and tragic death ought to do. She sat at the dinner table staring at the seat opposite her own where her husband had sat, full of life, full of oxygen and food and laughter, only an hour before. Then, with the routine calmness characteristic of any other Thursday evening, she cleared the plates and washed the dishes and did not appear to notice that a wine glass from her crystal set was missing.

Outside the window of Lena’s flat, slightly to the left and across the street, sat a surveillance officer in his vehicle with a pair of binoculars.

“It’s a sweet felicity, stupidity is”, mused the officer as he observed the newly-widowed Lena move about her home with an air not of mourning but of bewilderment. “Sweet, sweet felicity.” In his report later that evening, the officer would ascribe “non-threat” to Lena’s profile among the details of her husband’s death.

After she had washed the dishes and tidied the kitchen and reorganized the dining chairs, Lena walked slowly into her bedroom, shut the door, and drew the blinds. She walked to her bedside table and checked the time: 8:12pm. She stared at her husband's side of the bed where the indent of his body could still be seen beneath the sheets. Then, bent over the floor with her hands on her knees, she began to breathe sharply and uncontrollably until her face once more became numb, and she silently wept until she could not weep any longer.

She checked the time again: 9:37pm. She breathed one tremendously deep breath and slowly let the air out of her lungs, with her eyes closed and her hands firmly planted on her hips. She then walked over to the armoire opposite the bed, twisted the small brass handle, and opened the mirrored door to her husband’s collection of coats. She selected a duster of navy wool and wrapped a black scarf around her neck, covering nearly half of her face. She then took her husband’s hat from the hook next to the doorway, and placed it on her head.

She stepped in front of the armoire and looked at herself in the mirror. Lena heard ever so faintly, the memory having paled in the years since her death, her mother’s voice whispering in her ear, repeating the same line over, and over, and over:

“A stupid girl wrapped in lace, ought not to be shot in the face.”

In the reflection of the mirror, Lena saw the girl her mother had taught her to be. She saw the practiced simplicity, the rehearsed sluggishness of her gestures, the glazed stare dressed in implication of stupidity; she saw the carefully, elegantly, even artfully crafted girl who could hardly read or spell or remember what year it was or where she lived… And yet, if one looked closely, at just the right moment, perhaps when she was startled or introduced or left alone, perhaps when seated at a rusted metal table in a cold room and presented by MI6 with the plan by which her life was to be saved, a beam of light from the incredible furnace surging behind her eyes would stab momentarily through the callus of her costume.

“Lena”, she heard her mother say, “they’ll take anyone, no matter who you are, if you’re a soldier or a milkman, a farmer or a banker. They’ll take you and interrogate you for countless days, through sleepless nights, and they’ll throw you in cages stuffed with the feverish bodies of other wretched souls, and they’ll push you and push you, and just when you’re approaching the precipice of holy, gracious death, they’ll have you admit to crimes you did not commit. And then they’ll shoot you.”

The first of these lectures to Lena’s memory occurred just after her fourth birthday when she had mastered an arithmetic lesson meant for children three times her age.

“It cannot be known that your mind is bright”, she would say. “Here, at home, you may be as you like, but out there, where everyone is watching, where your market clerk who smiles benevolently and discounts your squash might just as readily hand you over to the police, you mustn’t be known for having the ability to do much of anything. Your weaknesses will be your strongest defense. If your mind is capable of nothing, they will leave you be.”

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Exactly one week before this day, Lena’s husband did not come home from work. Lena had known for some time that he was wholly disillusioned with the CPSU, and when he did not come back, she suspected that he had been found out, that he had been arrested, and that he may never come home. In desperation, she opened a folder he had left on the bedside table intending to rifle through the papers for an indication of his whereabouts, and there, sitting on top of a pile of documents, was a small slip of paper with the location of a meeting that was to take place that very evening at 10:45pm in a miserable building down an unlit hallway in a cold room. With her mother hissing in her ear to stay at home and wrap herself in a warm blanket and drool pleasantly out the window to the surveillance agent across the street, she closed the blinds and cloaked herself in her husband’s clothes, just as she would do exactly one week later when he was no longer missing and no longer breathing.

She appeared in the miserable building and was met at gunpoint by a slender agent and a considerably larger agent who had a square jaw and square shoulders and square hands. The slender agent led her down the unlit hallway and into a cold room and seated her at a rusted metal table on a rusted metal chair. It was here she would learn of her husband’s involvement with MI6, it was here she would be given the aluminum flashlight with the filter fitted to the lamp head, and it was here she would be given the instructions to board the train to Vyborg should her husband turn up dead.

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One week later, at 12:23am, Lena sat on the floor in front of the bedside table, draped in her husband’s clothes, and clutched the aluminum flashlight with the filter fitted to the lamp head. She had turned off all of the lights in the apartment, and left the blinds hung across her bedroom window open just enough to let in a small sliver of moonlight so she could stare intently at the clock.

At 12:37am, Lena rose from her sitting position and walked over to the window. The window faced the alleyway next to the apartment block, which sat perpendicular to the street on which surveillance agents planted themselves, just out of sight. She peered down the alleyway until she saw a slender figure dressed in black appear from a shadow. She gripped the flashlight firmly, held her breath, and pressed the switch. The beam shined through the filter, lighting up the glass edges to reveal a deep, mesmerizing emerald, and a brilliant green light splashed across the window pane for three full seconds before she flipped the switch once more, the light was gone, and the plan was in motion.

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Ten days later, a woman appeared in a duster of navy wool on a block in London with a British passport that bore the identity of one Ms. Nadia Ivanov.